Ken Silverstein: Everyone hates Jews, that’s obvious. I do myself from time to time, and I’m Hebraic. But the question at the moment is whether we Kikes are threatened by the Trump administration and the general climate in the United States.

The short answer is no.

We’re not all rich — take me, for example — but we generally have a lot of cash. We don’t run the media or the country, but it sometimes seems like we run both because Jews are prominent in both.

Putting appearances aside, Jews are politically and economically powerful, as a class, unlike African-Americans or Latina/os. Sure, Obama was the first pseudo-African-American president and Beto — he’s Hispanic, right? — and Julián Castro are Latino Obamas who want to be president, but all of these politicians, plus Kamala Harris, are white or light-skinned.

So is Uncle Bernie Sanders, who could become president if he decides to play ball with the white establishment and its colored flunkies. And based on Bernie’s support for regime change in Venezuela, I’d say he’s ready to play ball.

In closing, sure, there are plenty of ugly Jew haters in American politics and life, but as a class we Hebes are not seriously threatened by these white racists. We have too much power to fear power.

Andrew Stewart: I don’t know when exactly it was that I internalized the notion to vigorously and militantly police my gestures, speech patterns, and gender/sexuality expressions in order to make certain no one knew I was queer.

But somewhere in between fifth grade, when all the boys chased me out of my parochial school for evincing I was as normal as a three dollar bill, and junior year of college, when I left my parents rather flabbergasted by coming out, which neither of them ever contemplated, I figured out how to pass. After so much merciless teasing, threats, and multiple real physical attacks for being the obvious sissy boy, it became a matter of surviving the seemingly-endless nightmare that was grades five to twelve.

To quote a certain Jewish Nobel laureate whose audio recordings my mother used to play for us in the car (such high intellectual ambience in a beach-bound station wagon…), You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

I’m not a fan of the Oppression Olympics, not only because it cheapens the other person but also because it seems to diminish the meaning of my own scars. However, to borrow a phrase from Michel Foucault, “It’s resistance which unites us.” That solidarity can be the cornerstone of a wider project. So I do think it is important for me to lay this out at the forefront before delving into the preliminary thesis.

Judaism, like homosexuality, is today a demographic membership that has become well-integrated within our society. There can be and are LGBTQ+ lawyers, doctors, military officers, judges, and elected officials, as is the case with Jews.

In fact, one of the major political parties in Washington is officially led by a Jew, Chuck Schumer, and another Jew, Bernie Sanders, is attempting to take over that party with a multi-year mass-membership movement that spans the entire continent and, according to polling, includes those who might otherwise vote for the blatantly white nationalist Republicans.

As Norman Finkelstein points out, Jews are ironically both a) the most well-educated and most financially successful minority in America, and b) despite this, a reliable element of the left wing of the Democratic Party base who vote against their material interests.

With the exception of bizarre token outliers, such as Sheldon Adelson, America’s favorite Gargamel impersonator, and the politically-marginalized cohort neoconservatives (including their progeny in the case of the Podhoretz and Kristol families), Jews are reliable white collar liberal voters who support policies that they often won’t take advantage of.

Dr. Finkelstein on American Jewish population statistics/Fair Use.

Interpersonal bigotries are a norm of human existence that will be escaped in toto on the same day infants stop smiling after they fart. I will deal with my scars for as least as long as it takes for Jeff Bezos to be sentenced to the shining American Gulag being secretly built by Bernie Sanders on Martha’s Vineyard.

However, unless I intentionally align myself with those who are currently in the cross-hairs of the police state and risk some skin in the game (a game where skin color is the heart of the contest, incidentally), there are really no structural inhibitors to my financial success in this country because of the person I look like.

That’s pretty much the same for European-descended Jews in America. It certainly is horrific to see alt-right goons and deranged lone gunmen reviving antisemitism in tandem with a White House that seems to mimic the Dixiecrats with their shameless pig racism.

But I simultaneously think that complaints about Black Muslim Jew hatred are the same song, different lyrics rendition of Black Muslim queer hatred. And I’m inclined to think that most Black Muslim Democrats aren’t insufferable assholes!

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